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Lenovo Tinkers With Larger Delete and Escape Keys
Slatterz writes "After a year's research, Lenovo boffins have decided the time is right to install larger Delete and Escape keys on their updated ThinkPad laptop T400s range. While it is a small change, it is fairly radical to tinker with an area of hardware which has been largely unchanged since the 19th century. What convinced them to make the size-change was doing some tests on users to see which keys they use the most. They found that on average, people used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only non-letter keys that Lenovo hasn't made any bigger." The article says Caps Lock may be next on the agenda; death is too good for Caps Lock.
Pfft. Deletee kye? I never usses taht aneemore.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
and, more importantly, reduce calls during your off hours because a user locked out his/her account due to CAPS LOCK being on when entering a password.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I am happy to see some thought go in to "routine" matters like this -- too often I feel that laptop keyboards have abominable designs, such as shrunken space bars and control keys, miniscule arrow keys, or nonstandard placement of arrow keys, etc.
However, I would say the esc enlargement on my Lenovo is unneeded -- its location above the other keys means it is struck accurately. I would venture to say the same for the delete key, which I could locate with my eyes closed by its characteristic placement. I think the aesthetics of the vertical extension of these keys is going to be negative.
For my money, I wish they would just lay off the IBM keyboard design. Thinkpads should not have a Windows key. :)
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Lenovo has adware in their updates, but they might sell a laptop without a caps lock key! It's like they're simultaneously the worst and best computer company at the same time.
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
Yep, the key to the left of "A" should be Ctrl. That is one think about the OLPC XO-1 keyboard I like. The actual keys are crap, though.
They had laptops or typewriters with function and modifier keys in the 19th century?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Show me a keyboard that even HAD the Delete or Escape keys, idiot. Hell, when I learned to type, you had to use a lowercase L for the digit 1, and a capital O for the digit zero. Exclamation point was "apostrophe, backspace, period."
[
The article says Caps Lock may be next on the agenda; death is too good for Caps Lock.
If Lenovo is going to do it - Caps Lock will die a death and no one will notice. It is better for the industry to let Apple do what it does best and let the Caps lock die at Apple's hand. They will sell a iCapsLock add-on for $30 to stir up things even further and the caps lock death will then be rightly celebrated by the loads of forum posts and bickering by people newly realizing how much they miss the Caps lock now that it is gone.
is cruise control for cool
This is a ridiculous story as HP already messed with keyboards.
Try checking out the HP laptop keyboards on Canadian laptops. Dear god the layout on those things is terrible. The old QWERTY stuff is in the right place but punctuation etc... Is all over the place. Absolutely horrendous keyboards. I wound up having to use a USB keyboard with it as the default keyboard is damn near unusable unless you like doing a LOT of deleting and retyping of stuff.
I would like a bigger enter too, made so it takes more "vertical" space (somewhat relocating the \ key) like on some European keyboard layouts.
yes I'm aware of that but what did those typists need to 'escape' from? And deletion was not quite there either...
"...They found that on average, people used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week..."
are meaningless unless they (Lenovo) tell us what type of keyboard layout the tested computers had or even what applications people used. By the way, who constituted what they refer to as "people?"
How else would they use vi and emacs?
Sam ty sig.
HP/Compaqs are probably the worst computers on the market today. I don't know why anybody would buy one. Horrible quality control and service, no XP drivers for any of the newer units...UGH! Lenovos are probably my favorites if for no other reason than the mouse "track point" nub thingy and they're still easily available with XP. I hope they tinker with smaller price tags some day.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
They had laptops or typewriters with function and modifier keys in the 19th century?
Yeah, of course!
What do you think Ada Lovelace, the first programmer, used to code with?
I am anarch of all I survey.
So let me get this straight.
The best way to improve keying accuracy is to create even more derivative keyboard layouts?
I'd guess the del key might even afford to be *smaller* as it is used more often and hence more easily remembered.
I would have had a bit more sympathy if the article had said they'd placed it in a more accessible location ala space bar (rather than off to one side of the main keymap).
Maybe they could create a "Lenovo" key to sit between the "Windows" key and a new "Dave was here!" key. Then I can loan them my 16 button hexdecimal mouse[1].
Xix.
[1] Otherwise known as a digitizing puck
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I've got a couple Goldtouch keyboards that have a great improvement: extra Delete and Backspace keys on the left hand side of the keyboard. It's very helpful when you've got your right hand on the mouse.
Also, Goldtouch moved the Windows and Right Click/Context Menu keys off of the main area into a separate space. Both of these are great improvements.
Your design to a real part online: Big Blue Saw
That's because it's optimized for Canadian, not American.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Colemak turned it into a backspace, a clever thing to do and since then I rarely move my whole right hand to the upper rows just to hit backspace.
They should just put CapsLock along with PrintScreen , ScrollLock, Pause/Break.
...they would make the Any key bigger :(
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
well .. I for one don't. I own this one and the double sized delete key WAS a factor.
Laugh as much as you want, but my keyboard is the input device I use the most, and I'm pretty sure this is true for a lot of /.'ers. I find it always mind boggling that people will pay incredible sums for their mices, but will get $9,99 keyboards with the argument that "it's just a keyboard, you know". A keyboard should be as ergonomic as possible, unless all you ever do is click links in your browser.
When friends give me a list of notebooks with similar specs and ask me to tell them which one to buy, my answer is always to open notepad or whatever is installed, type a few sentences and buy the one that felt best, even if it doesn't have the best specs or the best price of the lot. Incidentally, the chance that that they WILL use the delete key is quite high, and a big one you can hit easily with your pinky without looking for it is, in lack of any other word, awesome.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Here's a better idea Lenovo: enlarge the: U, O, Y, K, C, U, F keys. ;)
Ahem. We still have 26 alpha and 10 numeric but about everything else has changed. Frequently. More like "largely unchanged since the 19th of June".
Yes, there's oodles of room for real improvements.
I love Sun Type5 keybards because the cut/paste & front/back keys is on the left hand side of the keyboard. Ditto super handy when your right hand is on the mouse.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
let's set so double the killer delete select all
Lenovo has boffins? What the heck are they, creatures from Lord of the Rings? Some kind of exotic bird? Wait, the dictionary says it's BRITISH SLANG. Well, you can just keep your esoteric BRITISH SLANG over there on your little island, buster, because we don't need no stinking BRITISH SLANG over here in America, or the rest of the world for that matter. If you can't write in standard English so English speakers around the world can understand it, just press your DELETE key (no matter what size it is) and go do something else. *grumble* damned Recoats *grumble*
Yep, the key to the left of "A" should be Ctrl.
Why? Because some obsolete VT-52 or obscure Wyse terminal had it there? What are you going to do with the right ctrl key if you move the left one above the shift key? Place it above the right shift key where the enter key is? Or perhaps you'd leave the right ctrl key where it is and have an asymmetric modifier key layout?
No, the real problem with keyboards is the NumLock key. The number keys and cursor control keys should never have been allowed to mix.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This has to be the biggest upgrade to PC usability since PC 97 added colour coding the mouse and keyboard connectors. Well done.
I find it always mind boggling that people will pay incredible sums for their mices, but will get $9,99 keyboards with the argument that "it's just a keyboard, you know".
The term is 'meese'. ;) As for $10 keyboards, my current keyboard was free. I got it off a 'dead keyboard' pile and it's awesome, can't beat the motion of the older keyboards.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Oh, man. There is nothing I hate worse than typing on than one of those Logitech keyboards that shuffle that whole block around. I can never find the home or end keys!
I have a Lenovo T400 and the placement of the DEL key always annoyed me. I use a program called KeyTweak (http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/) to remap my lenovo keyboard as follows:
Right CTRL key is DEL
Those silly keys to the right and left of the up arrow are HOME and END
And finally, drum roll please... the CAPS key is mapped to the TAB key so I have a gigantic space to mash my chubby fingers when looking for a tab stop!
Straight from Lenovo: http://lenovoblogs.com/designmatters/?p=1565
One that hath name thou can not otter
I don't care much about the Delete and Escape key changes mentioned in TFA... but I think the article's author gives a glimpse of tech-naivete' by suggesting that the Caps Lock key is obsolete. Just because he doesn't see a reason for Caps Lock out there in his little business world doesn't mean the key isn't highly useful to application developers. I'll point out SQL capitalization standards as just one example.
DELETE FROM my.memory WHERE opinion = his
/
COMMIT
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
More like pen and paper.
Le français vous intéresse?
The original function of Caps Lock is nuisance. If you are on Windows you can set Caps Lock to do an actually useful thing which makes your life a whole lot easier:
http://lifehacker.com/5278802/iswitchw-finds-windows-as-you-type
I am torn. The new thinkpad T400s seems like a great machine, finally approaching the thin/light form factor of my beloved, obsolete T41. I had actually given up hope, and gone to the much smaller X200 out of disgust with the more recent, bloated T-series thinkpads. But this keyboard change is horrible and might put me off thinkpads if it spreads to their future lines. I hope they'll retain a "classic" keyboard layout option, along with the various international keyboards one can swap in.
I find the ESC key on my current (and previous) Thinkpads to be good, because it is located above the function keys almost all alone in the top corner. (The same row continues with smaller speaker volume buttons, empty space, power button, and finally the useless PtrSc, ScrLk, Pause keys, followed by the top row of the relocated Insert, Delete, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn block. The worst keyboard I ever used as a programmer was on a Dell laptop, where the backspace was shrunken and the home key was in a strange place. I finally had to map home to backspace so I would get the double-wide backspace and stop jumping to the top of files when I was trying to backspace.
On the previous thinkpads, it is already easy to hit ESC because you can use the vertical screen bezel as a backstop to whack your finger into the corner and then drop with gusto when necessary. But I also use the external USB format of the Lenovo thinkpad keyboard, and find it easy to use there without a backstop. (In fact, I solved my keyboard adaptation issues by using a thinkpad and an external thinkpad keyboard on my desktop, so the exact same input layout is used at all times, including the trackpoint "nipple mouse" which is my primary requirement).
Amusingly, I use emacs, not vi, but I also use ESC all the time because I learned to use it as my emacs meta key years ago in assorted DEC workstations and serial terminals. I bang out the sequences ESC-x, ESC-q, and ESC-@ with regularity in emacs.
Or perhaps you'd leave the right ctrl key where it is and have an asymmetric modifier key layout?
As someone who maps caps to ctrl, yes. What's so wrong about it being asymmetrical? I at least had absolutely no difficulty with adjusting to that ctrl location -- the only problems was adjusting BACK when I used a computer without that.
I'm using a Dragon 32, you insenstive clod
I've been collecting vintage computer hardware for the last few months, and I gotta say, my Tandy CoCo3 (128K version) has by _far_ the best keyboard of any of the 8 or 16-bit machines I've used. I never used one back in the day, so the mint condition one I just got last month _really_ surprised me with the keyboard feel. I also got a Tandy 102 that was still in its unopened box. :)
Back to the subject of keyboards, though, to say noone has been messing with the layout of keys is to be completely unaware of computers of the last several years. Certainly there's a small player in the industry called 'Microsoft' that has been making some fairly commonly found keyboards that have the keys normally found above the arrow keys to be arranged in strange and remarkably unpleasant ways. I'm pleased to say the latest entry in their 'Natural' line has returned those keys to the proper position - the MS Natural 4000 keyboard not only unbreaks the keyboard layout changes they made in previous keyboards, but also returns the tilt to the correct location - the front, not the back (which actually makes things WORSE ergonomically). Plus it's available in beautiful, beautiful black. :)
On behalf of myself and all the other forum junkies can we please get a larger, ruggedized F5 key?
As someone who uses screen-profiles (yes they renamed it, but I can't remember the new name), those function keys are amazing!
Having to deal with many linux machines with command line programs running in multiple screen windows, havning no function keys would drive me insane. Actually, the fact that my N810 doesn't have them is annoying enough, but a real keyboard MUST have those keys!
I have a 16" lappy with a numpad on the right. Consequently, the number row (above qwerty) gets used for symbols more than numbers and my left little finger goes completely numb hitting that #*$#$@#$'ing shift key over and over and over and over again while programming. If they do anything, it should be removing capslock and making num-lock also toggle the number row (or have a second button to toggle them).
Maybe I didn't use it enough, but I always had trouble typing on one of those SUN keyboards with a few crucial keys in different places.
Sun does a couple other dumb things though, like make backspace 5 times harder to hit.
The ctrl-caps switch is really the only thing right about those keyboards.
I don't know what I'd want in its place, because for Windows typing, the common CTRL functions (X,S,V,C) are all easiest as LCTRL chords, and anchoring your left pinky to where Caps lock is to type these I think feels unnatural.
See, I disagree. After getting over the "wtf" moment with the Sun keyboard that introduced me to the ctrl-caps thing, that position felt like the most natural thing in the world. (Interestingly, the ergonomically split keyboard was much the same.)
You could also rig it up so there are TWO left ctrl keys, at least until people get used to the new location.
Replacement KB: $10
Replacement touch screen: $700
Any other questions?
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Numlock, arrow keys, Alt, Control, Windows/Apple, f1 - f12, page up, page down, scroll lock, insert, home, end, Fn... etc, etc
The statement about the 19th century is a load of shit. I remember a wide variety of keyboards from the 1980s. Slightly increasing the size of the escape and delete keys is nothing compared to, for example, adding a numpad or adding a green "copy" key. What about those ergonomic split keyboards? Surely that would be a larger change to the nineteenth century design than making a couple of easy to find keys a bit bigger.
The summary is stupid, an insult to our collective intelligence. There is no news here, no stuff that matters. It is simply slashvertising for Lenovo about something which really isn't all that interesting.
I don't therefore I'm not.
I agree about NumLock, except of course in the case where there's not room for a navigation block. I keep NumLock off when navigating web pages, because the numpad puts all the navigation keys in reach without moving my hand. I hardly think that's a pressing enough use to justify the feature. Software is, of course, perfectly capable of ignoring NumLock. IIRC Plan 9 always keeps the NumLock LED lit and treats those keys as number keys.
I've been very happy with my HP laptops and desktops and their quality control.
I wouldn't know about XP drivers, but the hardware runs current versions of Windows and Linux just fine.
Home or End?
There's a much bigger problem with those keyboards - copy, cut and paste.
Seriously, remove the insert keys in favour of large delete keys, and only n00bs who only know of Ctrl+X/C/V can use them. People who grew up with computers two decades ago have long learned that Ctrl/Shift+Insert/Delete is an order of magnitude better and easier to use.
Why stop there? The IBM Selectric is a bunch of new-fangled nonsense. In my telegraph office the keyboard only had one key and WE LIKED IT.
--.- . -..
Screw the esc and delete. Get that stupid function key out of the prime real estate in the bottom left and put the control key where it rightly belongs.
If you hate typing, you could try using speech recognition software. It's come a long way.
All I need to ruin your argument is one letter.
C.
Screw that. I want a mind reader. Interface directly to my tinfoil hat.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Dear Lenovo:
Put together a netbook, and make absolutely, positively sure to put the track point on it. I'll buy two.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Because it's NATURAL to have CTRL there. Jesus used CTRL that was left from A.
It hurts to hunt CTRL from the fucking corner. Better have both. Capslock is useless, either kill the fucker or hide it behinf FN-this or that.
I have capslock mapped as CTRL on my ubuntu boxes and on my mac - matter of clicketi-click via preferences.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
I used to do that. It gave me a pretty bad RSI (fingers and arms hurting day and night, even after quitting keyboarding for a week) when I switched from single-tasking DOS to multi-tasking Linux. I then switched caps and control and moved to Dvorak layout, which did improve things for me.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
It's bad enough listening to people talk on their cell phones, I don't need to listen to them talking to their laptops too.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
and, more importantly, reduce calls during your off hours because a user locked out his/her account due to CAPS LOCK being on when entering a password.
Give them Vista - it helpfully warns with "OMG WTF CAPS LOCK!!!" at login screen when it sees it on.
Then again, when the user cannot login, that's 1 problem. Once they can, be sure that there will be many more - so why call it upon yourself?
Mods: Actually, he may have a point.
IIRC, Canada gets two different keyboard layouts - US English, and French-Canadian. I'm guessing someone accidentally bought a French-Canadian layout.
I could definitely use a BS key. I'm tired of writing it myself.
gameDB
"I hope they tinker with smaller price tags some day."
Actually, they have. I'm typing this from a Thinkpad SL500, which cost me about half as much as a "real" thinkpad with similar specs (P7370, 1680x1050 matte screen), but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of build quality. Had to fix a lot of stuff before I got around to using it (keyboard was bent because of wires below, weird metal pieces with no discernable function made the palmrest bulge to the left of the trackpad), and the keyboard isn't exactly stellar - a complete joke if you're used to T-series thinkpads. It's pretty much a throwaway-Thinkpad - don't buy one if you're not planning on buying a new one in 2 years anyway...
...don't buy one if you're not planning on buying a new one in 2 years anyway...
I'm not really planning on it as long as my 11 year old Toshiba(445CDT) holds out. The only glitch so far is that the cd-rom slowly went "blind" and can't read anymore.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Second that. And make it a Thinkpad-Series model with MgAl rollcage, spill resistant keyboard and all that good reliability stuff we are used to from the other Thinkpads. A hundred bucks more is not a problem, but that thing positively needs to be resistant as a mobile phone or TV remote, ie. survive a fall from table height onto floor tiles.
Caps lock will be the end of unintended shouting
I would like you to meet my friend, Khassaki:
<Khassaki> HI EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> try pressing the the Caps Lock key
<Khassaki> O THANKS!!! ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO WRITE NOW!!!!!!!
<Judge-Mental> fuck me
(From http://www.bash.org/?835030)
No, the real problem with keyboards is the NumLock key.
Really? It's never a problem for me.
I think the really really real problems of keyboards are:
The Kinesis Ergo Elan keyboard fixes some of this. Do yourself a big favor and get one.
(I'm not a paid shill, but a very happy customer.)
I thought he was talking more about this
It seems like in general, people tend to talk a lot louder on the cellphone than person vs person, and I think it's mostly that people are irritated by.